Archive for the ‘suicide. MI. Woolf’ Category

Harrowing times? You betcha! To say the least: e.g.: a deranged & desperate-was he deranged, was he desperate?-Austin citizen loaded his Piper monengine with gas, and self droned himself unto the nearest IRS building: two dead. After torching his house, of course. The NYT reports: “I never saw Joe angry about anything,” said Billy Eli, a honkytonk bandleader who played with Mr. Stack for about three years. “He was just a middle-of-the-road kind of dude.” Talk about middle of the road dude. Harrowing. (But, there is evidence that a significant percentage of suicides-if not most- dont have any warning). I mean till the letters-emails- are discovered. Being a middle of the road kinda guy doesnt say anything about what happened. Until we read something after the event, and the middle of the road person becomes an avatar. As is argued in a rather well done essay by Dr Cytowic, in SEED magazine, about Virginia Woolfs’, bipolarism, writing and dying by stone loaded coat suiciding throwing(?) herself into the river, sinking and drowning. (It brings to mind, the death of Sylvia Plath, another suicidist-she and her work are harrowing and adorable). The point is VW left a letter to her loving husband. The Austin flying suicidist left a letter, kinda inescrutable.-though an argument can be rescued-seemingly to all of us. In the note to her husband, Virginia Woolf wrote; ‘Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.” Harrowing. In the standard phrase of the time, the veredict was ‘suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.’ Not so sure about this. I will leave it to you if want to read the Austin flying suicidist letter. I glanced at it: all about money, which is the spiritual capital of this society.

There is an instant when the “disturbed” mind, having made the decision of suiciding, has enough clarity and writes about it! How is this unstoppable? This moment is harrowing, freezes the blood and makes me wonder about the unity of consciousness or not at that moment. Could we call it a disturbed mind?